Time is Out of Joint: Trans Identity Assemblage in the Queer Temporality of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography

Virginia Woolf’s Orlando has already been established as a queer novel by several previous academic studies. Many of its aspects, such as the subversion of gender expectations, Woolf’s theory of the androgynous mind, as well as how the character relates to time, have already been separately analysed. Nonetheless, almost all previous studies view Orlando’s identity as a stable change signalling only one of his/her transformations. Recent analysis has pointed out to a different approach, interpreting Orlando’s gender identity as a nonbinary trans character. Following this line of approach, I argue that what is central in Orlando: A Biography’s narrative is the unique relation between Orlando’s nonbinary identity, time, and history throughout the text. I aim, then, to analyse Virginia Woolf’s Orlando from a trans studies perspective to disentangle the core of the relationship between Orlando’s gender identity and trans queer temporalities. To do so, firstly, I will focus on its classification of Woolf’s text as a transgenre, in order to open a discussion between the Orlando the character, and Orlando the text. Moreover, I will examine the link between the narrative’s structure and the character’s identity connection to time. To do so, I will rely on the latest sociological studies on nonbinary gender identity by Sebastian Cordoba, based on a queer interpretation of assemblage theory, together with theories about trans queer temporalities and its relation to history and time by Jack Halberstam and Elisabeth Freeman.